Modern Wisdom - #973 - Rory Sutherland - Waymo, Texas Culture, Airline Lounges, OpenAI & Uber Eats

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome back. Good to see you. It's a pleasure. What a joy and and here in Austin to here in Austin Buc-ee's you went to Buc-ee's tell me I've actually brought your present Oh, I thought you know, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't bring you local specialties And of course some some beef jerky as well. Jalapeno honey Thanks, I got good but the Buc-ee's thing is particularly good because they have a brand partnership with the But the Bucky's thing is particularly good because they have a brand partnership with the TX dot the Texas department of transportation. Okay.

Starting point is 00:00:32 So they licensed the don't mess with Texas, advertising slogan. Okay. Now this may surprise you. The don't mess with Texas. The rights to it actually belong to the Texas department of transportation because it was an anti-littering campaign. You're kidding. No, no, no. How old is this?

Starting point is 00:00:46 It dates back crikey to the, I think the seventies or, or at least the very early eighties, I think the 1970s. Okay. And it's a kind of famous advertising case study because how do you tell Texans not to litter? Okay. Now in other parts of the world, you know, simple kind of blandishments or appeals to their sort of higher order concerns might work, but this is a uniquely text message. There's low key aggression, unspoken threat of kinetic interaction. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:01:18 Yeah. Yeah. Actually, funnily enough, when they presented it, one of the people said, I find this a bit abrupt. Could we not make it? please don't mess with it. But of course, that doesn't work, does it? No, unfortunately not. Rather beautifully, Bucky's, which for the benefit of non-Texan audiences is, it's one

Starting point is 00:01:36 of those things which I think is proof that one of the great things Americans do is, it proves that you can take something that at a small scale is atrocious. And if you make it big enough, it's a work of art. And Buc-E's has done this with the gas station by making it so enormous. You take it from something, you know, comparatively ghastly. Marching bands would be another case. You know, if you go and watch the Texas A&M marching bands, marching bands are appalling at a small scale.

Starting point is 00:02:03 I think they're- Until there's a hundred people or more. If there are 500 people doing it, it suddenly becomes magnificent. Yeah. Well, I think the interesting thing about Bucky's for the people that haven't been again, it's a hundred pumps, maybe 200 pumps, something like that. And then the biggest Costco sized building behind that sells everything from life rafts to barbecues to jerky.

Starting point is 00:02:27 Deer corn particularly, I think they seem to go very big on deer corn, which is not something else. I think, I don't know whether it's a hunting thing. I mean, whether it's just that you want to attract deer to your, I suspect that's unlikely. I suspect it's a hunting thing. Right, like a trap or whatever. It's a kind of way in which you sort of create a trail of beer corn and then they wander into your sites or something.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Bookie is one of the, in fact, the only fuel station, gas station that I've ever been to that has so many pumps that even if you're not filling up for gas, you just pull up outside of one of the pumps. Well, I had an ethical dilemma as a Brit because my wife said, look, all these other cars next to the pumps are actually empty. The people who've just left their car by the pump and they've gone into shock. Cause it's under the shade. Now you wouldn't do that on M and S simply foods back home.

Starting point is 00:03:14 You know, you fill up, then you pull into one of the parking spaces and get out of the way. But you're right. There's so many pumps, though the pump doubles as a parking space. Yeah. It's also the only way because that's covered over, right? You're in the shade and so it doesn't mean that you don't get to be too hot. They also have about 50 electric car chargers as well. They've, they've gone big.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Speaking of which, have you been in a Waymo yet? No, because I tried to register. Now it's, it's an Uber partnership in Austin. It is. If you get an Uber, they'll send you Waymo. But when I asked for it, when I asked for it, they said you're on a trial or something that I'm on some sort of beta test.

Starting point is 00:03:47 Maybe it's because you're British. It could be. It could be some weird thing. But interestingly, I'm still trying to get a waymo. I had a friend who took one in San Francisco, actually took about 10 because he became addicted to taking waymos. And his judgment, I don't know whether you agree with this, he's pretty comfortable in a driverless car, just being driven around town.

Starting point is 00:04:08 He said out on the open highway, if we hit 60, I'd get a bit nervous. But he said at kind of town speeds, he was pretty content. I think the fastest that I'll have been will have been 35 miles an hour. It's just a little, but I do have a theory. I'm going to give you this one. So I noticed when I was ordering Waymo's on the app, it would say it's 10 minutes away or five minutes away. And it would almost always be between 50% and 100% more time

Starting point is 00:04:34 than it said it was to get to me. And it wasn't getting lost. It wasn't accidentally going somewhere. And then when I got in, my journey was also taking way longer. What I've realized is there's only two reasons, I think, that humans behave on the road in regards to other drivers. One is fear of retribution, and the other is the guilt of inconveniencing another person.

Starting point is 00:04:54 But with a Waymo, both of those are taken out of the picture because the back windows are so blacked out that you can barely see if there's anyone in. There's never anybody in the front seat. And what retributive, they're not going to tailgate you and beep their horn. In America, road rage is a mortal endeavor given that everybody's armed. So basically every time that a Waymo is at a junction, no one lets it out, no one behaves courteously to it.

Starting point is 00:05:23 Everybody knows if they pull in front, pedestrians, I do all the time when I'm walking, if I see a way more in front, I'm like, it's a little close, it's going to slow down. There's an economist, Douglas McWilliams in the UK, and he and I occasionally talk about this because we're both car enthusiasts about the extent to which motoring actually teaches social skills, social calculus.

Starting point is 00:05:44 So one of the little bits of social calculus, social calculus. So one of the little bits of social calculus, a good driver would probably perform, is that your readiness to let someone in from a side junction would be dependent on how fast you were going already. If you're stuck in traffic, okay, the calculus is, well, no skin off my nose

Starting point is 00:06:00 if I let this person in, I lose five feet of road or whatever, you know, by being generous. Consequently, we engage in those small acts of kind of altruism as motorists. We're also hugely sensitive to when you perform a favor, whether the person thanks you. So one of the great inventions, which I think originated in Japan, is the idea of flashing your hazard lights to say thank you if someone lets you in. I've never had that in America. I've seen it once or twice here.

Starting point is 00:06:28 It's less common, but it's spreading. It's one of those strange things. Interesting. It's a kind of, truck drivers kind of propagated it in the UK. But I mean, I was talking to Robert Trivers, who's kind of like, you know, the kind of doyen of evolutionary psychology. Trevors is a fucking legend. Oh my God.

Starting point is 00:06:48 He was talking about in Jamaica where, you know, your entire emotional reaction, if you perform an act of generosity is nothing to do with the cost of the act of generosity, it's whether it's acknowledged. So if you actually let someone through in East Kent, in London, nobody does it. But in East Kent, I noticed that if you pull in to allow someone to come through and, you know, and narrow, it's usually alongside a row of parked cars and you don't at least give them a little wave. It's that's bad form, bad form. It's really, really not done.

Starting point is 00:07:19 Um, and, but also we learn this kind of calculus of, okay, how much does it benefit them versus how much does it cost me? And there's a kind of calculus of, okay, how much does it benefit them versus how much does it cost me? And there's a kind of non-zero sum. Domesticating effect of being on the road. So I think that's probably true. I wonder if that's contributing to some of the extended adolescence delayed development thing we're seeing among Gen Z.

Starting point is 00:07:41 They don't drive. The fewer and fewer people. Psychologists, if you're not careful, can be quite psychopathic. There's that guy in London, right? That catches people that do that illegal U-turn. What's his name? Isn't he Australian? He's actually, I think he's Zimbabwean, white Zimbabwean originally.

Starting point is 00:07:58 Oh God, that's a terrifying combination. It's not promising. I don't want to get on the wrong side of the white Zimbabwean. Interesting on the road thing. Cycling Mikey, that's what he it's not promising. I don't want to get on the wrong side of the white Zimbabwe. Interesting on the road thing. Cycling Mikey, that's his school. Yeah. In the US, so if you, in the UK, if you are in front of the car that is in the lane that you're trying to get into and the car that's in the lane you're trying to get into isn't

Starting point is 00:08:19 moving quicker than you, you're either moving at the same pace or around about the same pace, it is almost maybe 90% of the time, the car that's in the lane you're trying to get into should pull back, give you a little flash and they'll let you to go in. Right. If you're more than about half a car length in front of them, they can see up your indicator, you do that in the U S people treat their lanes like it's their territory, they're so fucking Texans. Interestingly, despite their reputation for individualism, Texan drivers

Starting point is 00:08:46 seem to be quite generous. I mean, apparently, Massachusetts is the worst place. But you're right about the whole thing of lane possessiveness, that it's more extreme here than it is over in the UK. But your point, by the way, is quite worrying because it occurs to me that we're breeding a generation of young urban people who can't drive and therefore that sort of domesticating influence is lost. If you just sit around in public transport, you lose that social calculus.

Starting point is 00:09:14 And it occurred to me that when I say they can't drive, they may have passed their test and they may have a driving license, but there's a problem. It's very different to being able to drive. Well, if you live in London, two problems, okay? One, you don't drive very often. All right. Secondly, driving in London is horrible anyway. It's not really enjoyable.

Starting point is 00:09:33 But the third problem is something occurred to me, driving is only really enjoyable when you do it frequently. So you'll know this experience. Okay. You pick up a hire car. You're in an unfamiliar country The higher cars unfamiliar. You're not quite sure where the indicator thing is The country may have sort of weird norms like four-way stops that you're unfamiliar with for the first 24 hours of driving You don't enjoy it. You're fumbling around it. It's system. What is it? It's system to not system one to use a carnival phrase It's only with frequency is it? It's system two, not system one, to use a carnival phrase.

Starting point is 00:10:08 It's only with frequency that driving becomes system one. So now I've been in Texas for five days. I'll pretty much pick up the car outside the hotel and I'll drift off pretty contentedly the first, you know, the first five hours of driving were a little bit fraught and it suddenly occurred to me that a lot of people, if you live in a city and you don't drive frequently and you only rent cars, you don't know what it is to enjoy driving. You're always in that alien sort of... Alien kind of initial zone where it's, you know, it's kind of, um, you haven't got over the hump.

Starting point is 00:10:35 No, I love driving. I've heard you say that... So what have you, given that you lived in Texas for a few years, what have you gone for? I've got to ask you about this. Uh, 6.2 liter V8 Camaro. Fantastic. Okay, that's Fantastic. You've assimilated. Correct. I've gone totally f***ing feral, I think, rather than assimilating. It's beautiful. It's really fun. Dude, it was 40 grand, 45 grand USD.

Starting point is 00:10:57 Oh, don't. It's insane. For a 22 model, it was beautiful. It was everything that I wanted. It's got wireless Apple CarPlay. It's got cooled seats that you can press the remote start and it'll turn the engine on and begin air conditioning the car before you get in, including cooling the seats down, which in 105 degree weather is literally, it's fucking life changing. Yeah, exactly. I was like, and this is 35 grand GBP, 30 less than that maybe? I mean, they pay for cars in dollars less than we pay for them in sterling, generally.

Starting point is 00:11:29 It's crazy. So yeah, I love it. I love it. It's... I hope actually this is one area where Trump's tariff negotiations. I'd quite like to volunteer for the Trump team negotiating with the UK trade people on the grounds that, you know, compulsory and zero duty on Mack trucks. Well, Xchange, you can have our Land Rovers, you can have our Rolls Royces, you can have our Mini Coopers and we'll... You want to call that?

Starting point is 00:11:53 Yeah. Well, you would upgrade your Mustang Mackie. Yeah, I don't know. Have you still got it? I've still got it. Love it, actually. I'm debating. There's an interesting question about whether the new Cadillac lyric will be introduced, which is electric and is arguably perhaps, what would I say?

Starting point is 00:12:10 Well, you know, it's an extraordinary, I like luxury cars. So this is slightly embarrassing. I used to have a German boss and I used to really, really rile him by saying things like Lincoln Town Car, best car in the world. Okay. Because when you've got off an eight hour flight in New York, that's what you want to sit in, isn't it? To be driven into New York. And I think Europeans are absolutely unhealthily obsessed with cornering on the grounds that you don't do it, right? Acceleration is really valuable. You don't throw your passengers

Starting point is 00:12:39 around corners at extreme speed. I don't drive as if I'm on the fucking Neuburg ring, okay? I drive in a way that maximizes sort of, I like a little bit of speed and maneuverability, but I don't want all this yawing. Mostly in a straight line. It's about hurling things around hairpins. So a really good American car, this is not a fashionable opinion, I might add in Britain,

Starting point is 00:12:59 but my love of American cars is unabated. Good, how would you improve airport experiences? I've spent a lot of time in airports recently. So, I mean, one of the interesting ones is they're too big. I mean, the, you know, the, the shopping center component, which was novel when it first started has now become obligatory and you basically have to walk through the Houston Galleria before you can catch your plane. Um, and, um, London city airport, you've probably used that have you? to walk through the Houston Galleria before you can catch your plane.

Starting point is 00:13:25 And London City Airport, you've probably used that, have you? No, I've never been. Oh, you've never, okay. This is what's so funny. Okay, so there's an idea I'm playing with in marketing generally and in innovation, which I call reverse benchmarking. Okay, so the idea is what most companies do is they benchmark themselves against their competition. Now, the great writer on this is a guy called

Starting point is 00:13:52 Roger L. Martin, who's my own personal Canadian, my own personal business guru, extensive writer. He was Dean of the Rockman School in Toronto. And he wrote a piece called Benchmarking is for Losers, okay, that all you do is you diminish your margins by making yourself in direct competition with your other competitors. So you don't benefit your profits or your shareholders, and also you don't benefit your customers, okay? And the reason you don't benefit your customers is because they're then deprived of choice and differentiation. And you don't benefit the overall category because the category loses value because it's

Starting point is 00:14:34 more homogeneous, okay? And my argument is, and I got this inspiration from that great book, you've probably had him on, Will Gadara, have you ever had him on? No. Okay, Unreasonable Hospitality, fantastic book about a guy who ran 11 Madison Park. He's a major sort of food innovator in all kinds of ways. I think he's married to the woman who invented cereal milk, which I think is one of the most brilliant inventions, which is, you know, the milk you get at the bottom of Coco Pops would be the British, which is tastier than anything else

Starting point is 00:15:03 you've ever drunk. And she had the inspired idea of just flavoring would be the British, which is tastier than anything else you've ever drunk. And she had the inspired idea of just flavoring milk with breakfast cereal and selling it as a drink, which I think is just genius. Now his brilliant thing was he's number 50. I've told this story a lot, so apologies to people who've heard this before. He's number 50 restaurant in the world in the San Pellegrino restaurant awards. It's a three-star Michelin restaurant in New York. That's 2011. He wants to get to number one. Pretty remote ambition. It's not going to be easy. But one of the things he did was what I call reverse benchmarking. He took his team to the number one restaurant in the world,

Starting point is 00:15:41 and they started doing what we all do, which is how are we doing compared to them? They do this really well, let's copy it, etc. And at the end of the whole experience, Ghidara just goes to seem I'm not interested in any of that stuff. They're already doing that well. If we merely copy them, no one will notice. What I want to know, given that you've just been to the best restaurant in the world,

Starting point is 00:16:02 according to San Pellegrino, is what was a bit disappointing. Cause we're going to double down on that. All right. And the, the approach was they finally came up with two things that were a bit disappointing, which was one, the coffee was nothing special. And I found American coffee quality unbelievably high variance. And they just said it was fine. The coffee wasn't disgusting. It was just there was nothing particularly interesting about it. And of course, because he'd taken a few people to

Starting point is 00:16:32 the kitchen along, a few of them wanted to drink beer and the beer drinkers were treated a bit like second class citizens compared to the wine drinkers who are given all manner of bullshit with a sommelier and a letter conversation about the terroir, you know. And so he goes back to his own restaurant and he appoints one of his guys who's a coffee obsessive, the coffee sommelier, and another guy I think from the kitchens who is obsessed with American craft beers or all craft beers, he makes him the beer sommelier. Now imagine you're in this restaurant, now most of the people in the restaurant aren't going to ask for beer, but 10 or 20 percent of them will. Okay. And they're

Starting point is 00:17:09 expecting, yeah, we've got Sam Adams on draft or we've got this in bottles. And instead, they get a beer menu from the beer sommelier with suggested beer pairings. You know, the citrus IPA goes really, really well with the cod or whatever it might be. Now those people, you've blown their minds. Okay. It's not a question of, Hey, that was a bit better than I expected. So this reverse benchmarking is find out something that your competitors have completely overlooked, do it really, really well. And I would argue as a marketer and then actually turn it into a feature,

Starting point is 00:17:45 you know, spotlighting. And you could, you could almost take this and make it into a, I'm not going to say it's everything, but it's a generalized theory of innovation, which is, you know, what Steve Jobs did was take a field where everybody was focused on the tech and the capability of the machine to the complete exclusion of any aesthetic or usability consideration. You made it beautiful. And what he does is go, okay, now what I'm not saying is you can be shit at the technology so long as you make it lovely. No, you merely have to be kind of, you know, what you might call top decile in what you do somewhere else. But then you go off and you find the area which everybody else has ignored.

Starting point is 00:18:27 I look at things like, I'm a big fan of the Moxie hotel chain. I often talk about that. And what that is, is double down on the ground floor. You know, make the ground floor. We work on the ground floor. Don't feel weird when you checked out. Yeah. And that's one of the marvelous benefits you discover through experience.

Starting point is 00:18:41 Uh, you know, that actually after I've checked out of a moxie, I, every other hotel makes me feel homeless. But the moxie, you know, you may, okay, take your shopping trolley and your plastic bags and go and put them through the streets until your flight leaves. Whereas in the moxie, you just hang out for another five hours and get on with some shit and order their coffee and you don't feel remotely unwelcome. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. If your sleep's not dialed, taking ages to nod off, you're waking up at random times and feeling groggy in the morning, Momentous' sleep packs, how did I miss both of those, are here to help. They're not your typical knock you out supplement overloaded with melatonin, just the most evidence-based

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Starting point is 00:19:53 Right now you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. So what would you do to airports? Right. That's a really interesting question. What interests me about London City Airport is the fact that there's a natural benchmarking tendency which is

Starting point is 00:20:26 that when I was a kid, the rich kids had been to, you know, they might have been to, actually would have been to Dubai back then, would have been to Sharjah or something, but they'd been to Skipol or they'd been to Changi in Singapore. They go, it's amazing, there's shops, you know, it's like, because back then we hadn't seen a shopping center before and it was really novel, you know, I bought Walkman, you know, it was fantastic. Right? And then suddenly all airports became like that. Okay?

Starting point is 00:20:51 And suddenly people went, if you've been to London city, it's incredible. You go in and six minutes later, you're at the gate. There are hardly any shops. It's brilliant. Okay. So there is a really, really interesting idea. I mean, there is scope, lots of scope for really interesting innovation. Um, I think it's a lot easier also, it's worth noting it's a lot easier. If you want to premiumize an experience, it's a lot easier to innovate on the

Starting point is 00:21:15 ground than it is in the air. Now there is a fantastic thing, which friend of mine called Jeremy Stone tells me about, which is at Washington Dulles Where they still have these vehicles which I think were designed by Eero Saarinen the Finnish kind of inventor Where your lounge drives to the plane? Okay, so you get in something that looks like a room where you're all seated down and you know You've got a few little tables and you're comfortable and then the actual lounge is on wheels and drives to the plane. Wow.

Starting point is 00:21:48 Now it's a really, really interesting innovation because there's a Soviet era innovation thing called TRIZ, which is, it's the Russian for a technique for creative innovation or something. And they have a whole list of kind of principles. One of which is make the thing that stays still move and make the thing that moves stay still. It's just something in kind of mechanical and engineering innovation, which is a different way of looking at things. And so what's interesting about that, of course, is the planes don't need then to go to a gate. So the constraint, first of all, you probably save a lot of fuel because the plane doesn't have to spend so much time taxing.

Starting point is 00:22:27 The plane can be parked pretty much next to the runway. Can have a much smaller number of gates or whatever it is. And it means that every time you expand your airport, you just buy a few more vehicles. You don't have to go into a $1 billion building. You treat your airport more like a car park than a building. How can we slot these different maneuvering Lego pieces together so that they can fuck off in a straight line toward where the plane is? Here's a weird one.

Starting point is 00:22:51 So one thing would be nothing to do with airports themselves, but it occurred to me the other day, I was thinking I was trying to do a bit of reverse benchmarking. No hotels offer you a monitor. Okay. An external screen. You might have a 4k, you might have a 4k, you know, 85 inch TV, but in order to plug your laptop into it, you'd have to rip the thing off the wall.

Starting point is 00:23:11 Yep. Okay. It's weird to me that no hotels offer a dual screen experience. And it's weird to me that car hire companies, if you wanted to, if you wanted to employ all of America's young people in the summer, see if you agree with me. If you could pay a car hire company, very simple thing, you pay a hundred bucks, okay? And it's big money, okay? We will meet you at the arrivals gate and with your keys and we will walk you to your car.

Starting point is 00:23:41 Oh yeah, that's good. Like a concierge. Because, yeah, because that's the word, a car hire is terrifying. If you, if you're familiar with the airport, it's fine. Okay. But if you're going to- Where's the AVS? Oh no, that's the enterprise. We moved off site.

Starting point is 00:23:55 So there's a shuttle bus. There's a huge queue that I need to get through. Oh yeah. I haven't pre-registered my driver's ID. All of this stuff hasn't been submitted. Here's a QR code. Here's a single piece of ID that says I'm the person with the QR code, here's a one-time password that's texted to the phone that two-factor authenticates the fact I'm here.

Starting point is 00:24:13 Hello sir. Have you ever been through Dubai airport or the Middle East and been met by one of those concierge people? It's Sibaya, I think it's, no I haven't got that right, that's wrong. There's a word for it which is an Arabic word for hospitality or welcome. So you get off, you walk off the plane. There might be a book by someone in the 12th century. So don't, don't ignore that bit.

Starting point is 00:24:34 You walk off the plane and someone meets you. It's the same as being picked up by a driver at the arrivals gate exit. But it happens as you get off the plane at the gate. And then they say, Oh, Mr. Williamson here, let me take your bags. Let me take you through a special bit of immigration. He has a, a rival's lounge that you can get into. Please give me all of your documents.

Starting point is 00:24:58 I'll go and speak to the people for you. This is an air conditioned and lovely and there's water and a cool towel that smells of cucumber. And they look after your immigration experience. And I've only ever done this once and it wasn't me that was paying. It would be nice as well if I mean because actually the airport experience if you do if you go through it frequently does get weirdly stressful and annoying precisely in a weird way because it's repetitive and there's that paranoia that you're only one lost bit of paper away from complete. We were debating this, why is it that airports are so stressful? Now there are a lot of things, why is it that the boarding pass is completely unlike the

Starting point is 00:25:34 dimensions of your passport? Shouldn't it have kind of 3M sticky post-it note glue on the back? Well imagine if every passport around the world just had a small number of magnets on each corner and you could have a tiny bit of printed, on the printed paper, a tiny bit of magnetite. It snaps onto the back the same way that your iPhone has the safe thing on the back. And all that you'd need to do is hand the person, hey, here's passport and boarding pass.

Starting point is 00:26:02 Because that's the thing, you know, you don't ever know when you're going through TSA at the front. Sometimes they seem to want your passport. Sometimes they seem to want your boarding pass. And I can never fucking tell before I get there. By the way, a very interesting hack there. I mean, the various hacks, one of which is, and I can do a bit of product placement here for the Hotel Emma in San Antonio,

Starting point is 00:26:18 which is absolutely fantastic by the way, is I do actually carry an open bag. Cause the trouble with having everything zipped up, as I said, in the spectator is that every time you want to retrieve something, it's like making love to a goth, you know, they're just too many zips, okay. Right. You know, you know, you know what I mean? It's, it's kind of, you know, this season, Oh God, I left that thing.

Starting point is 00:26:40 Oh, which of these 17 compartments is it in? And I think a lot of, a lot of baggage design has gone in the wrong direction, which is these 17 compartments is it in? And I think a lot of baggage design has gone in the wrong direction, which is multiple sealed compartments. But you actually need one thing where you just go, oh, chuck it in there. I have a friend who uses a workman's bag, like a carry that you would have drills in. Oh, you unfurl, no? No, no, no, no. Imagine that, but cut the top half off and make the handles longer.

Starting point is 00:27:05 So it's basically a tray. Clever. Yeah, and it would have, you know, this is where the hammer goes, this is where the drill goes and you can see everything from above and he just picks his bits out and puts them back in. So London City Airport, which I recommend you because I think you can find a new castle there, I'm not quite sure. It has some pretty good strengths in that they have the new scanners so you don't need

Starting point is 00:27:24 to take your laptop out of the bag. Now it's amazing how irritating that is. It shouldn't be, okay? But you know, the kind of rigmarole you've got to go through deciding what goes into your check luggage, what goes into your hand luggage is really, really tedious. So there are technologies which are starting to improve things undoubtedly. Because I mean, it is kind of weird why that's so unpleasant. But I suppose what it is, is there's something about going back to school about an airport, which is you're at the mercy of various- Being dictated to, you got to wait in queues, you can't do the thing you want. Another element- There's a slightly weird one, I would think,

Starting point is 00:28:02 which is, oh, you're great privileges and you're in group one, which means you get to wait in an un-air-conditioned air bridge for 11 minutes standing there like a prat before we'll let you onto the plane. Whereas I imagine the people in the later groups can just breeze straight on. I don't know what's going on. Sometimes. I think it's an interesting one, at least in America. Something I've noticed, I live 12 minutes, maybe 15 minutes from Austin airport.

Starting point is 00:28:31 The reason that it gets stressful to me is that there's an inverse curve of tolerance that you have because you start to take the piss more and more. You assume that with experience, you're able to navigate the airport more quickly, but it's mostly out of your control. Yes, maybe you've got all of your stuff in the right places. You've packed the night before. You've already pre-ordered the Uber. You know when it's going to come.

Starting point is 00:28:51 You know that if you order Uber Black XL that it actually arrives a little bit quicker or they can take a different road because of the HPV people or whatever the fuck. But then when you get there, if TSA is slammed or if you you know You forgot that it's the beginning of spring break or something else that's going on. You're still gonna be screwed so for me the problem is as You get more experience at it You try to take the piss more but your experience isn't able to impact how quickly you can really go through the airport experience So, you know this you know this weird thing that, you know, the biggest car

Starting point is 00:29:25 company in the world doesn't own any cars, that's Uber, you know, the biggest lodgings company in the world doesn't own any property, that's Airbnb. And I always wondered whether you could piggyback on Ryanair, which for American listeners is a bit like Spirit Air, okay, in the U S it's a very ultra low cost carrier, okay. And this is how you do it. You basically you have a luxury airline which was totally banal in the air, but then that's only an hour and a half anyway in Europe. So you buy a country house near Stansted Airport and it would cost you 600 pounds return to go to let's say Madrid. And you turn up at the

Starting point is 00:30:03 country house, park your car, there'd be a party going on like something out of Eyes Wide Shut or, you know, the beach party in the Wolf of Wall Street, you know, there'd be fine wines and Belgian chocolates. And then you'd be driven to your Ryanair plane, okay? Cost of flight, 17 pounds, 95. Okay? And then you'd be kind of met at the other end. So in other words, you take a totally banal experience in the air, but you absolutely make the ground experience fantastic. In parentheses of something that's wonderful. So there's, I mean, there's infatigity scope for creating a kind of parallel network of

Starting point is 00:30:39 air routes, which are small airport, small airport, simply because, you know, Austin probably is a, is a lot easier than say Houston or Dallas. I've been, well, Dallas, Dallas gets very high scores from users. Um, it actually Dallas and DFW employed its own behavioral scientists, someone called Courtney Moore. I don't know if she's still there, but she had some very, very interesting ideas. So how do you stop people feeling compelled to queue before the gate has opened? And one of her ideas was you made the gate ambiguous until you were ready to board.

Starting point is 00:31:13 So you don't know where you're supposed to be. So you basically say, you know, your flight to London from DFW is boarding from gate 47 or 48. So you go, well, there's no point in me standing in a queue because I might choose the wrong gate and I'll look like a prat. So I'll go and sit in the coffee shop instead. That's clever. And then only when the gate opens does it become obvious which gate is actually your gate. It's interesting with gates because you can be more and less lucky based on where the gates located and what the close retail spots are around it. If you're in between the DKNY and the Louis Vuitton shop, you think, what the fuck?

Starting point is 00:31:47 I wanted to be next to the Starbucks. Heathrow Terminal 5, everybody thinks Pret a Monge, good. If you're going through Heathrow Terminal 5, you need to go to Pret a Monge. It's a British staple, even though I don't think it's British. It's not meant to be. It is, I think. It's built in Britain,

Starting point is 00:31:59 but Pret a Monge is hardly a fucking. You might be right. Might be owned by McDonald's, actually. I think it is. Okay. But if you're looking at the main pret, if you're looking at the big windows at the far side, you've come in from the back, if you take a left all the way down toward the lower numbers away from the business class lounge, keep all, keep going all the way, all the way, all the way down to the end, take a left.

Starting point is 00:32:20 Keep going, keep going, keep going. There is a much smaller pret that's there that still has everything, but it's down and on the side and there's never any queue. You've got a little walk-in. You go past the WH Smiths, have a little look at any of the bucks, but it is a... There used to be a brilliant easy jet hack, which was that there was a pillar at the end of the check-in desk. I don't think it works anymore at Gatwick. And the pillar led people to believe

Starting point is 00:32:45 that there was only one gate there, but there were actually two, but the queue was the same length. Okay. So it was actually, because, because nobody could see the extra little check-in desk, effectively the queue moved twice as fast. I think they've changed it now. So everybody queues in one line, but they used to be a rather brilliant, I mean, there are little hacks you can find. So an interesting, okay. Here's an interesting theory for airports. Okay.

Starting point is 00:33:10 Which is that generally people who fly in frequently, aren't that bothered by streamlining the whole process. Whereas George Clooney and up in the air, if you're a totally frequent flyer, you get almost unhealthily obsessed with streamlining the process. And one clever thing you can do as an airport, it probably wouldn't work at the scale of something like Heathrow, is you could build in secret shortcuts which were known to your ... the tube has them, I mean the London Underground. So there are places where it's signposts the exit is over there.

Starting point is 00:33:45 But the cognacenti know that if you turn right down a, you know, down a funny little tunnel, you cut 150 yards off your wall. But it wouldn't do to advertise it because it can't handle the traffic. No, no, you can advertise it. You simply allow them to be Easter eggs. Okay. So let me give you an Easter egg, which is going to ruin this for everybody that's listening. Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, if you go to their... That's a really annoying airport, by the way, because they should have made it two terminals, really. Okay. So what they've done is they've endlessly expanded that airport.

Starting point is 00:34:13 D, E, F, G. And if you're from Gate, whatever it is, C148, I mean, frankly, you could have walked home. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So most of the, a lot of people have layovers in Amsterdam. It's a real hub. It's well positioned. Problem is, it's kind of a bit of a fuck on to find somewhere to relax. It's really difficult. And the way that they've done this, kind of the same way that those benches have been designed in New York City to mean that homeless people can't lie on them because they're precisely the inverse of the shape that a human spine is supposed to make. Some

Starting point is 00:34:48 weird medieval torture device that masquerading is a fucking piece of art next to the street. But gate D2 in Amsterdam Schiphol airport is the only one that I've found that doesn't have armrests in between the seats. So it's a low bench that's padded and there's no armrests in between it. D2 Schiphol, is that right? D2 Schiphol. Yeah, there's a gate. You can lie down, put the thing on, you can lie flat on this. I've spent many a time at Gate D2.

Starting point is 00:35:13 There's a gate in London City, which is most people stay in the main kind of holding pen. But if you walk towards Gate 3 or something, there's a little cafe and a seating area next to it, which most people don't know about. So that's, that's, that's whoever's staffing the fucking, yeah. Whoever's staffing the Easter egg, Predamonjay and Disney, a gate D two in Amsterdam Schiphol is going to be fucked. A quick aside, if you're anything like me packing for weekend trips, somehow takes longer than the trip itself, which is why I've partnered with nomadic because this backpack is the best, most beautiful, most life-changing piece of luggage that I've partnered with Nomatic because this backpack is the best most beautiful most life-changing piece of luggage That I've ever found it's got a compartment for everything no more playing suitcase Tetris or rolling your clothes

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Starting point is 00:36:17 See everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. Talk to me about takeaway food. You linked me in with some guy that makes crazy Indian takeaway food. Oh yes, it's Nostalgia Foods and Narish Sankara, who's a food scientist at Berkeley, who like most Indian emigres and indeed British emigres to the United States, definitely- Wolfully disappointed.

Starting point is 00:36:47 Well, not always. There are, there are very good Indian restaurants in the U.S., but they're few. Okay. I mean, certainly in proportion, I mean, of course there wasn't much of an Indian population. And of course your spicy food is partly taken care of with things like Tex-Mex, et cetera. Okay. But anybody who's either British or Indian like Tex-Mex, et cetera. Okay. But anybody who's either British or Indian or Pakistani, Bengali, et cetera, would feel a bit deprived. And so he's found this

Starting point is 00:37:13 technology where you basically, you can ship chefs over from Hyderabad. They then prepare biryani, which you then preserve using NASA food preserving technology. And I've tried it and I've shared it with other people and it's astounding. Was it, we did the piratas that you were talking about. That's a different one. That's a thing called a frozen piratha, which you probably could get here. Um, uh, uh, and that's, that's an extraordinary thing. Cause you just, weirdly you don't thaw them, take them straight out of the freezer, bang them with a bit of oil in a frying pan, about one minute each

Starting point is 00:37:47 side and it's fantastic. Yeah I can't believe I the email thread that I was put in was somebody somebody at Berkeley.edu telling me that my industrial-sized order of NASA freeze-dried fucking Indian food had been. I was like what how have these five different things contributed to result in me eating Indian food, but rank- He makes, he also makes haleem, which is one of my favorite things of all time, by the way, if you've never had it. What's haleem?

Starting point is 00:38:16 It's, it's usually, I think lamb and I think wheatgrass, which is kind of soaked overnight in some shape. So it's like, the only way you can describe it is a very meaty porridge. And then you can pimp it. If you ever go to Saloo in Kinniton Street in London, they then bring you a little tray which has little bits of chili, little bits of ginger, little bits of something else, maybe saffron. And then you pimp the top of it by sprinkling these things. Like a make your own pizza. Yeah, yeah. And then it sits, it probably sits on top of rice or, or yeah, typically

Starting point is 00:38:45 I think it would come with rice. Absolutely magnificent thing. It's wonderful. And he makes haleem, he makes biryani, and, and hydrabadi biryani is considered the kind of gold standard in India. Okay. What's happened with changes in people's ordering preferences, given that so much of this is now done over screen. You look at McDonald's, you look at even, I would be very interested to know the difference

Starting point is 00:39:09 between a touch. Okay. This has a really interesting, I don't normally talk about AI because everybody else does, but one thing that strikes me as interesting about AI is when you change the context and the choice architecture within which people choose, so it's a screen rather than face to face. They make different choices. If you want my frank opinion, I think the whole property market is broken because everybody searches for property in the same way.

Starting point is 00:39:36 Okay. Now, one way in which you can innovate very reliably is it's quite hard to change a million people's behavior, okay? Because people are driven by habit and they've already got a solution to the problem a lot of the time. Yours may be better, but they're bad. I mean, literally when mobile phones were invented, we forget this because your generation think nobody had mobile phones.

Starting point is 00:40:01 They invented the mobile phone. Everybody bought a mobile phone. It was about 20 something years before it reached kind of, you know, really mainstream adoption. Now, part of that was price, part of that was technology. A lot of it was people saying things like, why would I want to make a phone call on the street? I mean, I don't know, literally, because they didn't really envisage the value that a mobile phone brought you until they owned one. Okay. And there's also the whole social proof thing that in the early days of owning a mobile phone, you were a bit of a wanker. Okay. So translation for Americans jerk. Okay. Now, what's quite interesting there is that behavior is slow to change. But if you change the context or the, or the interface, which people use to make a

Starting point is 00:40:49 decision, everybody's behavior changes. And so in McDonald's, one of the things they found, I think people tend to order a bit more when they order on a screen. I think I've heard anecdotally that the number of particularly males who order a meal with two burgers in it has gone up a lot because you felt awkward doing that face to face, even with a complete stranger who you are never going to meet again in your life. You just felt a bit awkward doing it. Whereas when you're ordering on a screen, they don't even know how many of you there

Starting point is 00:41:18 are because it's a screen. Obviously upselling may or cross-selling may become easier. You know, there's a limit in a spoken conversation. So it does strike me as interesting with AI, which is, if, which is possible. You know, there's this new device I think Johnny Ive's been involved in. I wanted to talk about that. Which is a thing which you wear around your neck and it uses the processing power of your mobile phone, but it basically talks to you.

Starting point is 00:41:45 Okay. I think you'll also need a matching eyepiece. I think that the glass piece is a huge one. A digital monocle would be quite good, I think, wouldn't it? I could see you. That stinks of you. Absolutely stinks of you. A digital monocle.

Starting point is 00:41:57 Yes. The digital Ponsnay for, or lorunette, you know, those things on a handle. If you change the way in which, so if suddenly, instead of going to a screen, I'm going, I need to renew, I need to rent a car, I'd like you to show me details of this, I need to choose a toaster, and that changes from being screen-based to say conversational and iterative, then everything changes. Okay. No, there's a possible way in which AI will make me completely redundant, which is not in the way that most people anticipate, which is advertising generally is a business trying to reach consumers.

Starting point is 00:42:45 The natural direction of travel of an AI-empowered world would surely be the other way around, where consumers appoint agents to find them things to buy. So actually, once you have unlimited what you might call search, there are no search costs, you know, okay, right, for the consumer effectively, in the sense that the searching is being done by an AI agent. Then effectively what you're doing is the consumer is appointing an advertising agency to find them stuff rather than the company appointing an advertising agency to find them stuff, rather than the company appointing an advertising agency to find them customers. And I can't see, you know, now I'm sure they're, you know, I'm sure, you know, I don't think

Starting point is 00:43:36 I'm going to starve to death, but it does strike me that that would seem a pretty natural direction of travel. And for example, things like the, you know, the real estate industry now Okay. Now that that sort of works with fairly crude search But it's not I think it's very very simplistic Which is where do you want to buy a house how much do you want to spend? Do you want a flat do you want a house? Do you want to buy do you want to rent? Okay That's actually it seems perfectly satisfying to the person going through that process,

Starting point is 00:44:06 but I don't think it's very, any more than dating apps are a great way of finding a lifetime partner necessarily. Okay. You know, the process of dating probably should be highly iterative, which is that you use what you find in the marketplace to refine your preferences. Yeah. You train it over time. You do it with your YouTube algorithm, even Spotify.

Starting point is 00:44:25 Spotify suggests new bands and songs to me. Like this really, you know, I wouldn't have even picked that and it knows. And that going back to your air fryer girlfriend, not a Corvette girlfriend idea, experience good, look, just trust that I know your preferences. There are things where the experience is better than the promise.

Starting point is 00:44:42 There are things where, I mean, the classic case where I always think the experience and the promise are absolutely at loggerheads in consumerism is camping equipment. So you buy a tent or a sleeping bag and the thing that really impresses you is how small it is when it's in the bag. And then you use that sleeping bag, you take it out of its bag and it turns into something, you know, basically the size of the Hindenburg, right? Okay. You think, that is magnificent.

Starting point is 00:45:07 How do they manage to get that sleeping bag into that tiny bag? And then it's raining and it's eight o'clock the next day and you've got to get the sleeping bag back in the bag. Wet. Okay. Wet. And it's a living fucking nightmare. So you could say there are airfly girlfriends and there are sleeping bag girlfriends.

Starting point is 00:45:23 The airfly girlfriend is,'re a sleeping bag girlfriend. Wow, this is much better than I see. You know, it's much more than it said on the tin. And the sleeping bag girlfriend is gone. It looks so great. But I mean that about all kinds of things like that, which is, you know, the conflict between the promise and, you know, undoubtedly advertising, I think sometimes over promises and under delivers, and then there are experiences where you under promise and, you know, undoubtedly advertising, I think, sometimes over promises and under delivers. And then there are experiences where you under promise and over deliver.

Starting point is 00:45:51 Interesting with the way that dopamine works with that stuff, right? That over promising on the front end is good for getting people through the door. And I imagine that you can launch businesses very hard with that. But how do you get repeat purchase and how do you get good customer satisfaction with that? Actually, I wish, a very interesting question actually, I wish there were, there are a few things, this is the whole question of how search works and it really comes into the field of decision science and choice architecture. Okay, so at the moment you tend to get ratings for restaurants,

Starting point is 00:46:24 I've always wanted hotels and one And I've always wanted hotels. And one thing I've always wanted TripAdvisor to offer is a list of the most polarizing hotels. Okay. Cause really interesting hotels are going to be slightly divisive. Okay. The Moxie would be divisive actually. You know, if you turned up.

Starting point is 00:46:42 If you're a family of four. If you're a family of four, you go're a family of four, you, where's the fucking pool. There's no kids club, but anything that's really good for some people is probably going to be deficient on some other measure. You know, I mean, the most extreme, I've always given this example, the hotel I stayed in in East Berlin, where it was, it was a former East German police station. The rooms had been cells. Okay. You actually slept on

Starting point is 00:47:06 a large platform above your own shower because there wasn't room in the cell to have a whole bed and separate showers. There was one television in the room, it was black and white, wasn't even a flat screen, one channel, and it showed, still does show to this day, the Big Lebowski on continuous loop. Now, if you turned up expecting the Marriott, okay, it would have been literally traumatizing, okay. On the other hand, if you wanted something that was authentically Berlin. An experience holiday.

Starting point is 00:47:33 And I ought to make the point, okay, I ought to make the point that in the middle of the hotel, it was a bit like the Moxie in that thing in that we invest in the communal areas, not in the rooms. Okay, there was a barista and a coffee shop. You sure it wasn't a panopticon in the middle of the hotel? No, no, no. Or everybody's room being looked at?

Starting point is 00:47:52 I'm pretty sure you're right. It shouldn't have been a panopticon. It shouldn't have been. That would have been real authentic. In the middle, in a kind of courtyard, was literally a coffee shop where I had probably the best flat white I've had in my life. When are we going to get a Hindenburg? We spoke about this last night. What, the dirigible?

Starting point is 00:48:07 Yeah, talk to me about everybody's desire to have a dirigible. Well, I've always wondered, by the way, I didn't fully answer the first question about star ratings, but I've always wanted, you mentioned repeat purchase. Nearly all businesses over-invest in acquisition and under- in, in, in, um, customer attention. And the reason is, I'll tell you the companies I don't think do that. I think family come family owned companies tend not to, because they've got kind of reputational skin in the game and they've got longer term time horizons.

Starting point is 00:48:38 And they're actually building a brand. Okay. I think companies that are owned by like private equity, companies that have short term time horizons are obsessed with quantification and it's always easier to quantify and measure acquisition of customers than it is to actually measure retention of customers because retention of customers is harder to measure, but it's also slow. Okay. If you do something, but I would argue, and this is when I, this is why I was

Starting point is 00:49:04 going to go, the only really obviously it doesn't work for one-off purchases also slow. Okay. If you do something, but I would argue, and this is when I, this is where I was going to go. The only really, obviously it doesn't work for one-off purchases like marriage. Okay. Right. It wouldn't work for, okay. But repeat purchase, you know, Amazon should have a kind of repeat purchase oh meter. Obviously again, not on things you don't need buy once in your life, actually, it's a pretty significant measure. It's not just how many people bought this thing, it's how many people bought this thing before rebought it. To tediously go back to air fryers, okay, very simple question. If your air fryer broke,

Starting point is 00:49:34 would you go and buy another one the next day? Yes. You would, okay? Now that's not true of yogurt makers, okay? And so consumers would benefit enormously. Interestingly, there are some libertarian economists who believe in this, that it would be perfectly acceptable for the government to collect information on certain things and to share it with consumers to make them better informed. So one interesting thing would be people who enter this category. So you might have, you know,

Starting point is 00:50:05 yogurt maker. I'm being a bit unfair to yogurt makers. I'm sure there are people who love the fruit. I can never be bothered. Churn our own butter as well. Why don't we do that? Let's pretend we're 17th century peasants. Yeah, I don't really get that. But it would be useful for the government. Electric cars, interestingly, generally have a very high repeat rate within the category. That, you know, it's, it, most people who actually go electric don't revert.

Starting point is 00:50:31 Question on that. I wonder how many of those situations are due to the fact that when you've planted your flag in the ground and your next door neighbors gone, Oh, Rory, that's a, well, that's an interesting, is that it's a Mac E it's an electric one. Oh, well you, it's the future, you know blah blah blah blah blah and then four years later when the car needs to be renewed and you go yeah I got I got the 6.2 litre V8 fucking Camaro you go but what about the all agree said about that and it's you have

Starting point is 00:50:55 to eat your own pride part of its consistency bias by the way part of its regret minimization part of it may be sunk cost which is it took me three months of effort to become really good at owning an electric car such that I could turn up more or less anywhere, charge the thing, not look like an idiot. Having invested that cost, okay, I'm more likely to actually stick with it. Which is in a sense, you know, in the dating market, that's why women have to play hard to get, okay?

Starting point is 00:51:23 Which is the cost of acquisition probably translates into loyalty and consistency. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to give somebody the job as they're at the interview the first time that you see them. It's usually not a good indication. Apparently, places like Gold with the Sax not only will subject you to about six interviews, okay?

Starting point is 00:51:41 Probably three of which are entirely gratuitous, but they don't even offer you a job. They wait for you to rig it. No way Somebody literally told me this test of agents literally They said it's really weird because I had six interviews They all went really well and I haven't heard back and somebody said you won't hear back They want you to ring up and actually pester them Now that may it was certainly one New York in one New York investment bank that literally would do that. They go, I'm not going to actually offer the guy a job. We've done six interviews, but-

Starting point is 00:52:12 It's on him now. We did six interviews, it's now on him. There are products, by the way, which is almost certainly goods to add a degree of friction. Because if there's a degree of difficulty, I mean, I have this- The IKEA effect? I have, yeah. The- The IKEA effect? Yeah. The effort you put into the acquisition of something contributes to the perceived value of the thing.

Starting point is 00:52:30 Yeah. This is your bit about the difference between cheap strawberries and pick your own strawberries. Yeah. Fundamentally, they mean something different. One of them is I put effort into the creation of value here and therefore the low price is destigmatized. Whereas if you made IKEA really, really easy furniture to buy, I think they had to offer delivery when they moved to the U.S.

Starting point is 00:52:51 because they were met with completing comprehension or something, because Americans had a higher expectation of service. But fundamentally, IKEA is pick your own strawberries. It's, I've put some effort into the creation and, and, uh, accumulation of this. Well, there's a double. Therefore the low price is partly a reflection of my own effort rather than just low product quality to begin with. Yeah, there's double effort as well. For the people that have never been to an IKEA,

Starting point is 00:53:18 first try and find the nearest IKEA to you. It is a real experience. Halfway around there's great quality meatballs, but it's a. There is a big one near Austin, isn't there? I seem to remember. It's not far. It's just in Round Rock. I remember driving past it.

Starting point is 00:53:29 Yeah. It's just in Round Rock. It's not quite as big as the Gigafactory, but it's pretty vast. Yeah. Um, you walk around this big maze for ages. So not only did you have to build the thing yourself, look at the instructions, have an argument with your wife about how it was going to work. Even before that, when you were in the selection period, you had to go through,

Starting point is 00:53:46 we are here to get kitchen stuff. Well, we've got to walk through the bedrooms and we need to walk through the lounge. We've got to go through the lighting department. Oh, we're at the kitchen. Okay. That piece of art over there is quite, no, we're on kitchen duty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is.

Starting point is 00:53:58 It's an ADHD sufferer's nightmare. You could actually sort of sell Ikea blinkers, couldn't you? Which are sort of, you know. To focus you in. Effectively, yes. But well, you could get get a you could do the concierge service again. Sir I'm going to take you directly to the kitchen area. Exactly. It's like being... Put a sack over your head like in Darko's. Exactly. And I'll lead you straight to the kitchen section. We'll get back to talking in just a minute but first some things are built for summer.

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Starting point is 00:55:33 When are we going to get? Oh yeah, you're absolutely right. Blimps. Yep. So we had this conversation that actually helicopters are not only dangerous, but actually they're a poor status marker because they suggest you're time poor. And so the theory was that the air yacht, which by the way did exist, you can see it on YouTube, after World War II, there was a company that turned something like Boeing Stratofortresses into flying luxury yachts, which I think could land on water. So actually wouldn't

Starting point is 00:56:02 be the Stratofortress, it must be in some sort of seaplane, okay? And there's actually a tragic thing of a family who set out to fly around the world, actually killed by people somewhere in the Middle East, because they landed somewhere in the middle of some tribal conflict. But the airship would be extraordinarily high status as a mode of transport,

Starting point is 00:56:24 because it suggested you had money, but you also had spare time. And of course you could have a degree of luxury, which is difficult in all, but the largest aircraft. I mean, I've always wondered about it, which is why is it that yachts are high status, but RVs are low status relatively, because I think American RVs, did you ever watch Matt's RV reviews on YouTube? I did, yeah. Matt Foxworthy, absolute genius in my opinion. relatively, because I think American RVs, did you ever watch Matt's RV reviews on YouTube? I did, yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:45 Matt Foxworthy, absolute genius in my opinion. And actually, by the way, interesting detail about salesmanship, three things we like about this motorhome, three things we don't like. Actually that's it. That's your one star, five star reviews again, right? Actually the admission of what you might call disarming candor is actually a good element of salesmanship because it actually contributes towards trust. The too good to be true heuristic kicks in and people actually get a bit unnerved. And one way of doing it, of course, just to say it is expensive,

Starting point is 00:57:17 but it's worth it. But some acknowledgement of a downside can be actually particularly, I think Robert Cialdini's is close to the point of sale, can be very convincing. Jay Leno on Jay Leno's Garage talks about the fact that he won't buy a Ferrari because the whole thing is mired in all sorts of weirdness. But he was very impressed because when he was buying a McLaren, he said, I'm quite interested in the ceramic brake discs or whatever it is. And the guy said, are you planning to track the car? No.

Starting point is 00:57:46 He said, I'll most definitely drive it. You don't need it. Let me save you $20,000 straight off the bat, you know, because, um, if you're driving around LA, they take ages to warm up, you'll end up hitting the car in front. Now that's a brilliant way of establishing trust of downselling someone slightly. Um, who else? Alex Hormozzi is very, very good at this. Uh, and that guy is an absolute

Starting point is 00:58:05 genius in my opinion. Yeah, he's one of the best funnel hackers in the world. Absolutely brilliant. I mean, it's fascinating to watch. I feel like, you know, but the airship, because I always thought when you think about RVs, okay, 99% of the world's interesting things are actually found on land, aren't they? Really, okay? And so there are also problems with the very big yachts, which is you can't go into small harpers.

Starting point is 00:58:32 So you end up next to an even bigger yacht feeling that you failed in life, you know, at the Monaco Grand Prix. I've always thought that actually, you know, if I was supremely rich, having a really, really luxury land yacht would be a great thing. Didn't we think about the fact that a hot air balloon is even more high status than a blimp? Because at least with the blimp, you have a tiny little turbine at the back that can direct you roughly.

Starting point is 00:58:56 The hot air balloon says, I've got money. It happened to be a luxury hot air balloon. I've got money. I've got lots of time to spare, and I don't really care what I've done. When you go, yeah. I'm so rich that I'll make it good wherever I go. That's very much the weird finding in airlines, which is that when you have a flight that's canceled and people have to travel on the next day, the general finding of airlines is that the people in the middle of the plane are really angry about it. Some of the economy travelers, they're like students. You give them a free night in a four-star hotel, they're going off to Asia for five weeks anyway.

Starting point is 00:59:37 This is a bonus. They're delighted. They get a night in the hotel. It's all a bit of a novelty. The people at the front of the plane just go, yeah, that's fine, I'll just go back into the Savoy and I'll book an extra night. And they're not bothered either. The people in the middle are going absolutely- Premium economy are fucked. I mean, the whole question, by the way, of one of the most interesting things, we're both fans of evolutionary psychology.

Starting point is 01:00:01 And one of the great predictions made in evolutionary psychology was made by Jeffrey Miller in his book both spent and the mating mind. Have you had him on? I have multiple times. Multiple times, okay. And this is a case of someone actually getting it bang on the money. He predicted that social media would fundamentally change not the human urge to display status, but what the currencies were. So he predicted that travel would become much more valuable as a status marker

Starting point is 01:00:29 because you can now photograph yourself in front of Machu Picchu. Okay. And basically, you know, while all your friends are at work in the rain, okay. And that the nature of the things that would actually enable you to display status through digital means and cars would be probably diminished or household possessions except to the extent that you can photograph them would be kind of diminished and that prediction has been pretty much borne out and what you're I mean what's interesting there is that you know a very interesting question would be status of a job.

Starting point is 01:01:08 There was no debate that it was better if you had to work in London, it was better to earn 100x than 50x. If the choice becomes to today's young, you can live in Lisbon or Fuerteventura or for that matter, you know, in the middle of the New Mexico desert. You can live there for 50 or you can live in London for 100. It's not altogether a slam dunk to decide who's got the better job. When you were both competing for identical resources and that the only variable in employment was how long you worked, how much you got paid.

Starting point is 01:01:49 That was employment economics for hundreds of years basically. It was assumed that place was a given, that when you worked was a given. And so the only variables were effectively how long you worked, how much you got paid. Maybe commute. Yeah, I guess. I mean, there would be people who'd choose jobs because the commute was easier. Famously, there was one London bank that moved next to a railway station and they found they could never get rid of their older staff because they'd all moved to the country, bought an

Starting point is 01:02:19 F off house, and they just rumbled in on the train and walked, walked a hundred yards to the office. Those guys weren't going anywhere. But suddenly you have this technical employment market where as well as free time, there's free where and there's free when. So if you can work where you like, when you like, and a colleague of mine, Brian Featherstone-Haw said, also if you work with whom you like. All of those things are now negotiable value counters alongside the money. And so, you know, it's a really interesting debate. If you're an employer and you want particularly talented people, but you haven't got the immense budget which enables you to compete with JP Morgan or something, while offering lifestyle

Starting point is 01:03:05 benefits or locations where near affordable housing strikes me as a pretty smart place to go. What would you do to improve food delivery apps? This in the US is even more than there are in the UK. So many different... We have Deliveroo which you don't have, do you? We have JustEat which you don't have, do you? We have JustEats which you don't have? No, and JustEats kind of feels a little bit sort of internet in 2005-y to me,

Starting point is 01:03:32 up against something like an Uber Eats. I mean, Deliveroo interestingly is, I mean, they're probably moving to delivery of not just food as well, which is interesting. I mean, what ultimately happens there is fascinating. So you use DoorDash presumably before UberEats. I use UberEats, but one thing- They do this slightly annoying thing that I always find, which is, oh yeah, okay, your meal comes to $35. That's a bit expensive, but hell, they're delivering it. What the

Starting point is 01:04:01 hell? And then they go, pay us another $5 and we won't urinate on your food. That's another $7. Yeah. And by the time you got unfinished. Have you ever done this? So if you go into, if you go into the Uber app, just normal Uber app here, and then it's got this suggestions thing in the middle. Now everybody below your two most recent places that you've been and whatever it

Starting point is 01:04:21 is that you're going to type in about where you need to go, everybody forgets that. places that you've been and whatever it is that you're going to type in about where you need to go. Everybody forgets that. If you go to suggestions and you look here, car hire, bikes, stuff for teens. And then if you go down and get anything delivered, food, grocery, alcohol, convenience, health, personal care, baby gourmet, pet supplies, flowers, retail, electronics, you can go get anything done, a courier or a store pickup. So if you've left your watch in a gym, you can send the fucking Uber guy to go

Starting point is 01:04:47 and get it for you, or you can get your pharmacy delivery, you can get them to get pretty much anything. What they're interestingly suffering from is the interesting thing, which is kind of the Starbucks pret dilemma. Okay. Which is pret is mentally known for food in the UK and they want to sell more coffee and Starbucks is known for coffee and they want to sell more food. And what they're doing there with Uber, which is quite clever, is they're obviously predominantly

Starting point is 01:05:16 associated with one particular application. Okay. And people have got into the habit of getting food delivered because they had food delivered before. You just booked it by telephone You know, it was a pizza in 1989 or whatever that was Domino's whole stock in trade And so actually getting people to broaden their repertoire Within it's quite a common marketing dilemma, which is it's almost it's almost as a market equivalent of the innovators dilemma

Starting point is 01:05:43 You get known for one very good thing. Now Starbucks, I think possibly, and I think Howard Schulz was conscious of this, they were so desperate to sell food because they saw it as incremental value, you see. And so in other words, the coffee stuff was one thing, but the food they more or less saw as incremental profit, that you then start diluting your coffee credentials if you're not careful. Yep. And it's interesting with, for example, Pret, I think has experimented with various subscription services and so on and so forth to get people to up the coffee consumption.

Starting point is 01:06:20 Well, like a loyalty card? What Uber's doing there is it's quite, because they do trains in the UK, obviously you don't, you know, so you literally can book any train on Uber. No way. And coaches and I think a few other things. Fuck me, I haven't been back to the UK for long enough. Wow, that's cool. And so, but I mean, where's your, what's the problem you have with the, because I find

Starting point is 01:06:44 that I've used Uber Eats and apart from that slightly weird thing of continually demanding extra money. I'm a fan of Uber Eats. I think the main issue I've got at the moment when it comes to the intersection of food and digital is I'm still often overwhelmed and confused when it comes to choosing, especially in a city that I'm not familiar with. Yeah. And I don't quite know what the metric is that I want.

Starting point is 01:07:09 So distance from where I am, especially if I'm going to go somewhere. You land in Manhattan, you're on the Upper East Side, you think I want to go for some food this evening. And maybe you don't even have that specific, your missus can't decide, whatever. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:23 You go, fuck, okay. So I need to kind of reverse engineer what I think it is that she wants and she says she doesn't want anything, but I need to, if I get this wrong, I'll know. And if I get this right, it's acceptable. My wife claims to be lactose and gluten intolerant, which makes things even more tedious. Right. Okay. So I'm looking on Google maps and I go, okay, well, I'll order by first off I need to filter by open now. That seems pretty important given that I'm trying to go now. But after that, it's just this, it's really difficult to, okay, well, this one's a 4.5

Starting point is 01:07:51 stars, but it's only got a hundred reviews. This one's a four star, but it's got 2000 reviews. And it's just probably a Brit. So you'd like to order the food by degrees of spiciness in some cases, would you? That? I mean, I do. It's certainly a criteria I look at. Yeah, it's just, I struggle,

Starting point is 01:08:07 and especially if I'm somewhere new and I'm on Uber, okay, I can either order sweet green or Carver, a flower child for the millionth time, or I can try and get something that's at least remotely localized to wherever it is. It's gonna be a unique experience. But also I've got such potential buyer's regret here. I think, God, this is my only sustenance for the evening also I've got such potential buyers regret here. I think this is my only sustenance for the evening.

Starting point is 01:08:27 I've had to wait 50 minutes for it to get to me and I'm going to hate it. Yes, I agree. Yeah. By the way, by the way, I think all these people will start, start to have, have to start offering Monjaro portions soon. Okay. You know, because actually if you look at the effects of, what are they, GLP ones on people's calorific

Starting point is 01:08:46 consumption, it seems to affect all sorts of impulsive behaviors, actually. Seems to have an effect on sort of gambling addiction and weird. They never anticipated. But if you look at, Walmart had a lot of good data on this because they obviously have pharmacists, but they also have their loyalty card data so they can see the effect that it has on what people buy. I saw talk from the chief economist at Visa about two days ago. Some of this is people eating out more and shopping a bit less, but purchasing, which was on a constant upward trend, purchasing of food from the grocery aisle, which was on a constant upward trend, purchasing a food from the grocery aisle, which was on a constant upward trend, seems to have flatlined. Now what's interesting about that is that's with probably eight to 10% of the US population on some sort of GLP-1 treatment.

Starting point is 01:09:38 Now if it causes flatlining with 8%, what the hell happens when it's 25? So now I don't think the prognosis is all bad. I think that people on those things will actually have small, which maybe, maybe, maybe this is the direction of, of capitalism, I would argue, or the desirable direction of consumer capitalism, of which I'm something of a fan, is actually less, but better. You know, in other words, rather than having a chocolate bar, that's, you know, that's the size of a small field you have, you know,

Starting point is 01:10:12 you, in other words, you treat yourself to smaller quantities of things that are of a higher quality and you become more mindful about your enjoyment of them. Did you see that speech at the end of the white lotus where the lady didn't watch it. You haven't watched it. Okay. She gives a speech, which is, you know, speech at the end of the White Lotus where the lady from- Didn't watch it. You haven't watched it? Okay. She gives a speech which is, you know, effectively we're the most privileged 1% of people in the history of the world.

Starting point is 01:10:31 We have a duty to enjoy ourselves. It's a- It's a wonderful argument. Wonderful argument. And it was, it was interesting because she wasn't an altogether sympathetic character, it's probably fair to say. Although, um although the whole family were actually more interesting in many ways than anybody else.

Starting point is 01:10:50 I don't know why they were chosen as being from North Carolina. I think there's a whole lot of American nuance in there that he went to Duke and she went to UNC or something. Okay, a whole lot of weird sort of stuff in there, which as a Brit, I couldn't entirely disentangle. But there is actually a degree of validity to that, which is that, you know, if you're in a privileged position, it's actually slightly rude to your ancestors. It's disrespectful to your ancestors, in a sense, and to other people less fortunate than you to go around not enjoying the things that you have in some active form.

Starting point is 01:11:33 There's a meme that's floating around on the internet at the moment, and it's a guy stood in front of this sort of cosmic backdrop, and it's millions and millions of small silhouettes of people, and it's my entire ancestral lineage watching me lift weights instead of talk to a girl for the 3000th time. Perfect. Yeah. Before we continue,

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Starting point is 01:12:46 I mean, that's an interesting one as well, isn't it? Which is the, I mean, one of the other things the economist revealed is the amazing number of single person households. In other words, people not in a relationship. I think the most calming living arrangement for a man under 35 is still at home with his parents over 18 and under 35.

Starting point is 01:13:09 The most common living arrangement is still with parents. And that, you know, again, unfortunately bring me onto one of my other hobby horses, which is the need for, um, uh, land value tax, uh, to make properly more affordable and basically to get these oldsters out of houses, which are bigger than they need. Because family formation has become impossible. Okay. Now, this is one of those cases, which I often talk about, which I think we need to be permanently

Starting point is 01:13:36 alert to, where something comes along as an option and becomes an obligation. Explain that for me. Okay. So Naseem Taleb taught me all this stuff, the huge difference between an option and becomes an obligation. Explain that for me. Okay. So Nassim Taleb taught me all this stuff, the huge difference between an option and obligation, which is, personally, I hate drinks parties, right? I like dinner parties. I hate drinks parties. Last night, last night for me was what?

Starting point is 01:13:55 One, two, three, four, five, six. That's close to my upper bound. I think when you get to seven, seven to eight, that's starting to get a little much for me. But back at home at Monmouth, there was a man called Wilson Plant. He was an extraordinary man. I mean, he sat in the pub, sort of presiding in the pub, and someone would have a discussion and it would get a bit intellectual. I go, well, how do you know D.H.

Starting point is 01:14:17 Lawrence thought that? And he'd reply, because he told me so. So he knew everybody. So Nancy Mitford, I mean, he was just one of those people who in his twenties and thirties, he'd just been in sort of London society. And he had a rule for a pub conversation, which is between the graces and the muses. And I think I've got this right. There are three graces and there are nine muses. And his argument is that once a pub table, you know, once a pub table gets below three, it's time to go home. Okay. Once it gets above nine, you should split off and form another table.

Starting point is 01:14:46 I'm in agreement. I think, I think, by the way, I don't mind drinks parties in the garden, uh, because you can wander off. That's little clusters. But if, if, if, particularly when you're 59, you, inside, you can't hear a fucking word anybody's saying anyway. Okay. So back to your land value.

Starting point is 01:15:01 But back to my options and obligations thing. Okay. So interestingly, the only good thing about a drinks party is you go, yeah, yeah, that's fine, Saturday night. And if you don't feel like going, you don't have to go. Whereas a dinner party, if they've actually prepared food and they're going to be eight of you and they don't, you know, they want to match up the genders or whatever it is anybody does.

Starting point is 01:15:19 I don't know if anybody does that anymore. Okay. But you have to go basically. You have to have a really good reason not to go. So that's an obligation. Whereas the drinks party is an option. Okay. And the ultimate option is six of us going to the pub this evening, if you feel like it, come along. That's an option. Okay. Whereas Dave's stag party is a fucking obligation. Right. Okay. Now, Nassim taught me this distinction, which obviously understands perfectly from finance. It's a massively important distinction, whether you

Starting point is 01:15:51 own an option on something or whether you have actually an obligation. Now, what happens quite a lot, I think, and we need to be really alert to it, is something comes along. Now, a classic example of this would be parking apps. Now the parking app comes along and you still have machines, you still have meters that take coins, you still have a pay and display machine as we call it in the UK. But if you want to you can pay by app. And you go, oh, that's fantastic. I really like that. That's great because I don't always carry a lot of coins with me. This makes it really convenient. Absolutely fantastic. You go, isn't this good?

Starting point is 01:16:26 The world's getting better. And then the people who operate car parks notice that they, that it's a lot cheaper if they just get rid of the pen display machines. Okay. And also they probably lose a bit of money from fraud or theft maintenance and all that stuff. And then suddenly you're stuck with only the parking app. maintenance and all that stuff. And then suddenly you're stuck with only the parking app. If you're 70 or 80 years old, this sort of shit is starting to turn the world into a nightmare.

Starting point is 01:16:52 The extent to which you're expected to have a smartphone and have the eyesight to use it and master a pace of change, which is actually something imposed on us, it's not chosen by us. That's becoming, by the way, you're talking about airports, okay? There is nothing at an airport between disabled request a wheelchair and walk, okay? There's no halfway house for someone who's a bit elderly, but doesn't actually want to be wheeled through. And I think, given the fact that wealth is more and more concentrated again among the old nowadays, the extent to which a lot of modern built infrastructure is extremely disrespectful

Starting point is 01:17:35 to people who are just a bit elderly. In other words, they're not fully registered disabled, but they are constrained, I think is monstrous. Anyway, another example of what starts as an obligation and as an option and becomes an obligation is actually the two income household. Okay. So there was a period, obviously women entered the workplace, married women particularly entered the workplace a little bit during World War II. I think it was something like 10 to 15% of women were actually working in war work, that changed things. But for a long time, it was, do we want to actually both go out to work and have a pretty blinged up, you know, fancy ass lifestyle option?

Starting point is 01:18:16 Or would we prefer that one or either, you know, it doesn't have to be man or woman, or would we prefer if one person stays at home and one person goes out to work. Now, for that blissful period, it was still possible to maintain a household with children on one salary. The two-income household was great news for property owners. It was great news for the government because you had twice as many people you could tax. What it meant for the typical family, now I'm not making any value judgment about this, I'm just simply saying what's true, is you lost 40 hours of discretionary time each week without necessarily enjoying a market improvement in your discretionary income.

Starting point is 01:18:57 Because all that happened was that house prices basically went up to mop up the spare income that was made possible by two people in a relationship working and therefore the gains went to landowners, landlords or indeed our parents' generation to some extent, rather than to the people actually doing the work. We were all eggs at liquidity for everybody else. What do you make of Gary Stephenson's ascendancy and that sort of messaging that's happening in the UK? Well, first, a frivolous point, which is if you want to help with wealth redistribution,

Starting point is 01:19:29 Gary, go out and spend some fucking money. Right? I mean, he was earning like two or three million pounds a year and only earning one pair of shoes. Okay. And his mates from school were working in JD Sports. And I did help. I couldn't help thinking, reading the book, Gary, just go down down to GDsports and just buy a few pairs of shoes.

Starting point is 01:19:48 Help out your mates. Okay. You know, get a hot tub, you know, you know, but his fundamental insight, unbelievably stingy. Do you not think you need that book? I haven't read it. I've seen him talk on. But geez, Gary, just go and, you know, enjoy it for crying out loud. Okay, I

Starting point is 01:20:06 Think you get that weird thing actually in banking which is so much of your enjoyment stuff back then Was covered by an entertainment budget. Okay that you got really really resentful about spending your own money Is it you sort of mean most of us the money comes in? 80% of it walks straight out again because we piss it up the wall. You know, I haven't got an air fryer for the second bedroom. But there are people who kind of, if you're in that very corporate world where more or less all your fun is taken care of by some expense account, you actually find spending

Starting point is 01:20:40 your money disproportionately painful. He's absolutely right in his insight that money is becoming unhealthily concentrated. In the two things I would say, he's absolutely right that economics uses these single representative agent models which don't capture inequality. I would argue personally, Gary, that you need to read up a bit about Georgism, which I think the great ideas of Henry George and the land value tax would actually take care of a lot of that, in my view, if you tax land ownership. Because property ownership is effectively you are buying the right to impose taxes on the younger generation.

Starting point is 01:21:25 When people invested in gold, it doesn't do anybody else any harm because I can make do without any gold. I'm not massively into bling, not hugely into jewelry. We can all get by without gold. If there's a bloody Dutch tulip boom, I'll just switch to gladioli. Okay, but I can't substitute for property at some level, if your employer demands you work in a major city, okay, and land and commutable land is scarce.

Starting point is 01:21:57 Other than the blimp, of course, where you could just live tethered above Berkeley Square, 400 feet up, okay, other than your blimp solution, there's no escaping the depredations of rent-seeking landowners. And what has happened is that we've, in a way, we've sanctified wealth and been pretty mean on income. Okay, so we've taxed away income discrepancies pretty energetically, but they aren't that big. Okay.

Starting point is 01:22:26 I mean, what I mean by that is if you look at income inequality, even before tax, never mind corrected after tax, you know, the number of people who earn like, you know, 20 times median income, okay, is they exist, but there are very few of them and they pay an enormous amount of income tax. I mean, huge amounts of income tax. In other words, that's someone who's probably like a high-end lawyer and a partnership in, you know, a London Magic Circle law firm. Now, there are a lot of people I'd rather the money went to than people in law firms, but nonetheless, those people pay a lot of tax, whatever you think about it, okay?

Starting point is 01:23:02 By contrast, wealth inequality is monumental. I mean, there are people who, if they walked into a football stadium, every single person on average in that stadium would now be a multimillionaire simply because Bill Gates walked in. There aren't inequalities like that of that kind of extreme form in actual earned income. And yet we have this incredibly aggressive system of redistributing earned wealth, and yet we have this incredibly aggressive system of redistributing earned wealth, and yet we treat wealth that's actually resident in asset values and things as completely sacrosanct. And the problem is until you actually get to that point where you start actually taxing, now Texas does it, amusingly, because you have quite heavy land taxes. So ironically, what's often stereotyped,

Starting point is 01:23:47 I think, unfairly as, you know, the most conservative state in the union, which in fact is not okay, but you know, it's a highly conservative state, you actually pay quite a lot of tax on the value of the property you own. So the property taxes in Texas, I think around 2.5% if you own it. Now, the great effect that has is that it makes property less expensive because you have to pay tax on it and it prevents you using property as an extractive store of wealth. OK. And the extent to which I think you have to argue that speculation in

Starting point is 01:24:24 property has been absolutely delicate property has led to enormous redistribution of wealth effectively to the not necessarily very deserving old at the expense of the hardworking young. I just find it impossible to dispute. I'm 59 by the way. I did okay. I surfed the wave. I didn't surf it very well.

Starting point is 01:24:46 I now own a couple of flats. I don't own a house, nothing blingy. Okay. I now own a couple of flats sort of outright. But there are people who bought a house in 1974 whose children, this is literally a case I know of, okay. So there's a woman living on her own in a five-bedroom house not far from where I live which is probably

Starting point is 01:25:10 worth with the garden 4.5 million, okay, or 3.2 or something like that. She has no money to spend. She has all this money tied up in a totally illiquid form of wealth, so you know she's kind of going down little and comparing the price of lemons, even though she owns a fuck off, you know, three pump. Her children are kind of worried about how they replace the shock absorbers on their car. And then the argument would be, why should those children go out and work really hard? What I do to be honest is get into debt, go off to Barbados, wait for your mum to die. Fuck me. But nothing you do working, let's say, as a school teacher.

Starting point is 01:25:54 So there's this great book, you must get her on, called The Inheritocracy. Okay. By a woman called Eliza, oh God, I'll remember it in a second. You're becoming increasingly left-wing here, Rory. No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm pretty right wing in terms of people's earnings because you have actually earned them. So Henry George effectively, the way to understand Henry George is it was an approach to life which actually had a brief but extraordinary success, popular success in the United States. The game of monopoly is based on it's trying to interest people in George's principles

Starting point is 01:26:23 of extractive rent seeking. And the basic principle of Henry George is that it's, now I'm going to qualify this, it's extremely free market and capitalistic with regard to the fruits of your labor. Anything you do, anything you build on your land is yours to keep, but it's effectively highly socialistic in terms of land ownership and arguably ownership of limited resources. So a Georgist would also tax oil, for example. The argument is you didn't make those things that would have been in the 19th century. They would have said, this is God's creation and you're only, you know, you're actually, you don't own it because you didn't make it.

Starting point is 01:27:08 You don't have the right to own this thing because you didn't make it. What you are is a custodian of it and you pay commensurate tax on the land you own. Okay. Whereas you would in purest Georgia circles, you have no income tax at all. Okay. That probably a bit extreme. But it's sometimes called geoism. And there's also a school of thought, which is kind of environmental Georgism, which is you tax the consumption or you tax anything where you rivalrously consume something of which more can't be made. Right. Yep. Okay. And what happens in Texas, quite interestingly, is all these Californians apparently move to Texas and they go, God, the land here is really cheap.

Starting point is 01:27:53 Let's buy loads of it. And then six months later, they get hit with a massive tax bill for their land ownership and they go, what the hell's going on here? We bought this land because it's cheap. And the Texans reply, that's why it's cheap. You pay 2.5% tax on here. We bought this land because it's cheap. And the Texans reply, that's why it's cheap. You pay 2.5% tax on it. Did you ever look at that issue with fighter pilot seats that was designed for average? Yeah, that's a brilliant point. So that's similar, that's analogous to Gary Stevens.

Starting point is 01:28:17 Have you had Gary on by the way? I haven't. He was supposed to come on in London a couple of months ago when we last had you on. I hope he's out shoe shopping instead. I mean advertising, maybe halfway Gary. If you want to redistribute wealth, it does help if rich people occasionally go out and buy something. There's an interesting debate going on about whether or not Gary Stevenson is basically thinly veiled performance art. That you've got this, the get up, the same pair of joggers, all the rest of this stuff.

Starting point is 01:28:47 It is, I don't know, it must be difficult to have. I think he's, okay, apart from his consumption patterns, I think he's fundamental. So there are a few things where the problem with all these models is that the assumptions of the model that are necessary to simplify the model eventually come back to bite you. And looking at average wealth as if it's somehow representative of, you know, that a successful mean and variance is not the same thing. One that's getting richer on average. The fact that for 30 fucking years in the US and the UK, we presented rising property

Starting point is 01:29:24 prices as a good news story. Is monstrous. I mean, that was just the most monstrous misrepresentation of information. You don't say petrol has got gasoline's gone up, but good news, you've got a full tank of petrol. So your car's not now more valuable, right? Is it a case of kind of a luxury belief that the sort of people who would be writing and

Starting point is 01:29:42 consuming those and understanding those sorts of stories are likely to already be people who own property. So their lesson is not going to be, holy fuck, it's going to be hard to get onto them. You're absolutely true. Even worse, of course, every single MP in London throughout the 70s, well, 80s, 90s, 2000s was basically heavily invested in the property market because they got a massive perk. They got their mortgage paid on a London home. So there wasn't a single person there with a possible exception of someone, you know, was Ken Livingston ever an MP? I'm not sure he was, but apart from a few very, very principal leftists or possibly a couple of

Starting point is 01:30:18 Georgists in the Conservative Party, it's a weird, by the way, it's a weird sort of philosophy because it's both left wing and rightwing. And so it has its adherence. At the same time. Milton Friedman was a fan. So was, God, I always forget her name. I was married to Malcolm McLaren, the fashion designer, Vivian Westwood. She was also a Georgist. You get Richard Nixon, Winston Churchill. Wow. It has its adherence everywhere.

Starting point is 01:30:43 Really crosses the spectrum. But what happened in the model was that Adam Smith thought there were three sources of wealth creation, which was land, capital, and labor. And future generations of economists thought it's too complicated having three things because it makes the maths difficult. So we'll pretend that capital and land are the same thing. And they're not. Because capital is potentially limitless and you can create more of it.

Starting point is 01:31:05 Land is effectively an artificial bottleneck. It's a rent-seeking device. I'm interested whether or not you've got any insights around painkillers. Every single time that I think about a psychological effect of something that people assume has got some sort of a drop-off rate. I know that there's some studies saying that more expensive painkillers are interpreted as being more effective. So even if... Yes, no, no, no, that's undoubtful. I mean, I'm the only person who complains you can't

Starting point is 01:31:32 buy expensive aspirin anymore because my argument is I haven't got a 30p headache. I've got a £2.50 headache. By the way, I think there are a whole load of things where in the human brain, the X has to be commensurate with the Y. So, if you're buying a house, the reason you have to have a posho estate agent is because fundamentally, if I'm spending this amount of money, I expect a certain amount of money to be spent on the act of persuasion. And it may be highly performative, but it's just a kind of idea of what's proportionate.

Starting point is 01:32:05 You know, if you turned up to look at a sort of $5 million mansion outside Austin and the guy just turns up and goes, here are the keys, go and have a look yourself. If something we've, it's a bit like the fact in women's fashion that if you spend $150 plus you've got to get a rope handle bag, right? There's a commensurate amount of bullshit necessary to accompany any activity in order for it to seem somehow natural and right. Lovely finding by the way from the visa chief economist about the American South including Texas.

Starting point is 01:32:39 They look at what happens to consumption patterns when people suddenly get more disposable income. Okay, typically gas prices fall, suddenly disposable income goes up right across the board. What happens to things that are really different? Women's expenditure on clothing, massive spike. Men's expenditure on clothing, flat line. Because in the South, if you've got a pair of jeans and a shirt, you're fully dressed. That's it. I think that's fantastic. But Gary's point, by the way, about that thing, which is that the single representative agent model, the average model is flawed because actually one of the most interesting philosophically, okay, the perfect place to live is not somewhere where everybody's a lot poorer than you.

Starting point is 01:33:27 Right? Because their consumption patterns will then mean that there's nothing for you to buy. So standard of coffee. I always had this slightly socialistic idea when I was watching Downton Abbey. Okay. If I'd been the Marquis of Downton, right, those people were immensely well, they had been broke, but he married the Canadian, didn't he? Those people were immensely, well, they had been broke, but he married the Canadian, didn't he? So they were kind of rich again. There was a

Starting point is 01:33:49 whole period where nearly all aristocrats had to marry Americans because it coincided with a massive fall in agricultural prices. And there was a, there was kind of, after World War I, there was kind of agriculture. Oh, I don't know. That's, do you know what it was partly? It was refrigerated shipments of beef from Latin America and grain from Canada. So suddenly the value of agricultural goods in the UK fell off a cliff. And so the the aristocracy basically headed West to try and pick up an heiress. But what I always thought about those people is they they obviously lived in a fuck off house, you know, Downton Abbey. But they ate food cooked by the same woman every single night.

Starting point is 01:34:32 And my theory was that what I would have done had been the markers of Downton is I would have trebled the salaries of all my servants, okay, and I would have given them three days off a week. Because then an interesting Indian restaurant would have opened in the nearby village and you would have had somewhere else to eat. Okay. Oh, wow. You see what I mean? Yes.

Starting point is 01:34:50 You know, there'd be a car dealership and there'd be a bit of other stuff to cater to these richer people. Then actually redistribution of wealth in some ways is not altogether a bad thing because you want everybody around you to be a bit poorer than you. Have you looked? You know, let's be honest about it. You want your neighbors to be a tiny bit poorer than you so you can show off a bit. Turn up and fuck off six point two liter Camaro.

Starting point is 01:35:10 Is there not a rule supposedly about you never want to own the most expensive house in the neighborhood? There is an argument that says you buy the cheapest house on the most expensive street, not the most expensive house on the cheapest street. I've also got various property rules for how to game it, which is like, find out something that everybody else hates that you don't mind next to a pub. Okay. If you're thinking really long-term, you might think that with car electrification being next to a busy road, isn't the downside that it once would have been. It's going to get quieter.

Starting point is 01:35:41 It's going to get a bit quieter and you'll worry about pollution might diminish, but that's, that's quite a long game Yeah, but you know, don't worry about the school district if you haven't got kids or you're not planning to have kids Oh there are there and one of my complaints about the property market is there aren't mechanisms for you to look for negatives Because actually a negative I don't care about is actually a positive But no in terms of drugs, by the way, you're getting back to the placebo effect on drugs and do they have to be expensive? Does the packaging matter? There's a serious issue here, which is I don't think vaping would have taken off if you'd

Starting point is 01:36:18 medicalized it. If you demanded people went and got vaporizers on prescription and they came in sort of, you know, typical medicalized packaging. I think the fact that it was a bottom-up trend with all the marketing hullabaloo and pizzazz and packaging and flavors and, you know, all the extraordinary kind of, you know, the distribution, you know, I think that contributed to the successful adoption of it. I think if you made it medicalized, I think you would have got about a quarter of the rate of adoption.

Starting point is 01:36:49 Similarly, low alcohol beer. Low alcohol, no alcohol beer fascinates the fuck out of me, partly because I think it's placebo beer. I think that when we drink in zero alcohol beer, we still enjoy some of the psychoactive effects of drinking alcoholic beer by the power of association. I would love to see a behavioral observational experiment go on to see what's the words per minute, how many swear words does somebody use, how much does their body language loosen

Starting point is 01:37:20 up having not ingested any alcohol but drunk something which is supposed to masquerade as it. There's a bit of a theory that among regular drinkers that you drink alcohol to give you the license to behave like a drunk person. It's kind of both. Do you see what I mean? It's partly that the alcohol loosens you up, but it's partly that the fact that you are drinking alcohol makes you feel you can loosen up. I've certainly experienced a weird effect, which quite a lot of people I've spoken to

Starting point is 01:37:51 have had the same effect, which is you go out for the evening. Typically, I take a train out of London back to Otford, as it happens, and then drive home from there. And once or twice I've been out and I've had two or three pints of zero alcohol beer, and I'm suddenly driving home from the station, I go, shit, okay, I'm over the limit. No, no, no, no, no, I haven't had any alcohol at all. But I've had two or three of those kind of weird panic moments where I go, because mentally somehow I've been out for two or three beers, and yet obviously as far as the breathalyzer

Starting point is 01:38:21 is concerned, I'm sober as a judge. Edward Slingerland wrote a really interesting book about the history of alcohol. So two cool facts on it. One, drinking alcohol makes you a better lying detector. So your ability to detect deception improves. That's where it comes from, because I heard that from somebody else. Edward Slingerland. And the second thing is that drinking reduces your ability to deceive. So you have this really wonderful effect.

Starting point is 01:38:46 Oh, so in vino veritas, which is effectively that both you're a better lie detector and you're a worse liar. So this is now, if you think about it, the argument there might be that by suppressing certain, what you might call highly literalist parts of the brain, we actually gain powers of sort of intuition over things like lying. Because the part of the brain that processes language might, you know, this is going Ian McGill, have you had Ian McGill Christ? Yeah. So Ian McGill Christ would probably say the left brain tends to have a very literalist interpretation of language, but it processes much language, but metaphor or analogies are processed in the right part of the brain.

Starting point is 01:39:32 A little bit broader. I think it's a bit broader. So one of the things that might be absolutely true of alcohol consumption is it makes you less literal. Oh, which may explain why it increases. I mean, there, there is that weird view of alcohol that it's, you know, that being a human is kind of tiring and this gives you two or three hours of knowing what it's like to be a bit of an animal.

Starting point is 01:39:53 Right. Regret back to a feral state. You will be, you know, no human is ever as happy as a cat that's found a warm place to sleep and there may be, there may be. Forbid as deep as about being like a cat that's found a warm place to sleep. And then maybe- Four beers deep is about being like a cat. You effectively start just in, you know, people seem to react hugely differently in my experience. Some people become violent, some people, you know, but there is that element to alcohol that it probably enables you to enjoy the sheer physicality of being, because it quietens down those parts of the brain.

Starting point is 01:40:28 Without the awkwardness of thinking. Yeah, yeah. Interesting one related to people being tired of being themselves. Parents are all in on all-inclusive travel again. Demand for kid-friendly all-inclusive resorts is up 70%. Luxury tailored to parental burnout. So that's the all-inclusive resorts is up 70% luxury tailored to parental burnout. So that's the all-inclusive, which is basically you have...

Starting point is 01:40:54 Part of that, of course, is choice reduction, isn't it? If you've got an Italian restaurant and an Indian restaurant and a Chinese restaurant and there's a buffet, you don't actually need to choose where you're going every single night, it's self-contained. The whole thing is, so I always wondered about this, which is one of the reasons I always recommend, I've got a few recommendations for holidays for my 30 years experience. One, the only generalization I'll make is that holidays where I rent a car are better than ones where I don't, because you get serendipity. You can achieve that through walking in a city, but that business where I ended up stopping on the outskirts

Starting point is 01:41:30 of Florence to recharge an electric car and then because I had nothing to do for 20 minutes, I wandered around the corner and there was a kind of leisure center and public swimming pool, not the kind of place you'd ever visit as a tourist in Florence. Then I walked a bit further and then my wife and I discovered this fantastic cafe, which was just, you know, it was totally casual cafe, but it was just glorious and it's one of those things you, you know, pleasant, optimized for pleasant surprises. And the problem with having a really planned holiday is that

Starting point is 01:41:57 you don't get any surprises. In fact, you tend to get negative surprises. Um, so that's why I'm a big believer in car rental on holidays, because you just stumble on things that nobody else knows or a beach that nobody else goes to, and you just feel great about it. And also it means that if the hotel you happen to book is absolute shit, there's almost certainly something pretty good 10 miles away, and you can just get up in the morning and go and escape.

Starting point is 01:42:24 I've never booked a hotel that's absolutely shit, but I booked hotels you wouldn't want to stay in for too long. But on the other hand, there's an element, this is the contrary point, which is one of the reasons I quite often go on holiday to an island is there's a limit to the number of things you feel obliged to do. The curse of Tuscany, okay, is that within about 90 miles there are, you know, there's Siena, there's Lucca, there's Florence. You've got to go over the mountains of the moon to see the Pyridola fucking Francescas. And you go, fucking hell, I just want to sit

Starting point is 01:42:57 by the pool and get quietly pissed, you know. And so the great thing about islands, you know, is that, you know, they constrain the number of things you feel obliged to do. And the second time you go back, you've already done the things you were obliged to do. So you don't have to do the things you wanted to do. So there is an element to things where actually choice limitation, presumably childcare is taken care of. One thing I've repeatedly said to the hotel industry, by the way, talking

Starting point is 01:43:26 about when you said child-friendly, all-inclusive. I actually said this to Expedia in their headquarters, so I hope they listen. You've got to get rid of that designation, adults only. Because I know what it means. It means you don't allow kids. But I see adults only hotel. Look. Perverts. I see adults only hotel. I go look Forbids, okay. I don't you know, I go, you know swingers Yeah, I'm quite quite keen on a quiet thing without too many noisy kids, but it doesn't make me think that it makes me think I gotta spend my whole week in a gimp mask while a German dentist urinates on me now I don't want to do that, you know, call me old-fashioned

Starting point is 01:44:03 right and So adults only is a terrible designation. I did a competition on Twitter and loads, literally 15 people came up with better alternatives to adults only. What was some of your favorites? One of them was just grownups, you know, hotel for grownups was one brilliant suggestion. Just grownups and adults. Yeah, because if you were to call it a mature hotel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or you just, you know, you just go, you know, quiet hotel or you just say, oh, you know,

Starting point is 01:44:27 over 16s only, we fine. But adults only, I'm going on, I don't want to tell you. Adults only is an awful demarcation. You're right. Skims are now selling a bra with a nipple piercing in. Oh, that's not really, so the bra is pierced, but not the nipple. So it's got sort of a silhouette. It's got the silhouette of a piercing.

Starting point is 01:44:50 So it looks like you've got a nipple piercing, but you don't. I have to confess, the tats and piercing thing. I was born in 1965 on the Welsh borders. Okay. I've never really got my head around that shit. I'm no, no, no, I don't mind. I tell my daughters they could get tattoos if they wanted to so long as they said dad Okay, that was the that was the other heart a massive heart. That was allowed nothing else, of course

Starting point is 01:45:16 But that's it's quite clever it's a trompe-l'oeil nipple piercing now the only problem there is is his false promise isn't it because People who are really into that piercing stuff are going to be disappointed. Are going to be suddenly disappointed. Yeah, and people who would be turned off by it are going to look at somebody who doesn't have a nipple piercing. So it's not going to work.

Starting point is 01:45:35 I mean, you did hear that wonderful story, did you? It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard about the problems of the rich, which is the great complaint of Calvin Klein's daughter. You've never heard this? No. That this is not a problem you ever anticipated which is the great complaint of Calvin Klein's daughter. You never heard this? No. That this is not a problem you ever anticipated about coming from a family where your parents is rich or famous, which is Calvin Klein's daughter.

Starting point is 01:45:53 His great complaint was that just at the peak moment of getting romantic with a man, you were suddenly confronted with your own father's name in Inch High letters. Now, I've, you Now, my wife has never had to pull down my trousers to be confronted with Clive Whitmore written across the elastic band in huge letters. You can imagine that's a bit of a turn off, isn't it? It's slightly alarming.

Starting point is 01:46:21 It doesn't set the mood. That's fucking brilliant. Uh, ad campaigns that have cuddly animals that are anthropomorphic. Yep. Here we go. Buc-E's for everybody who hasn't been. It's the Texas Disneyland. But you say that ad campaigns that include a cuddly animal that talks

Starting point is 01:46:38 to you are more successful. Fundamentally, I've always wondered whether the theory is that the odd extreme, the extreme opposite of that was for many, many years in the UK, BMW advertising would never show people. The most you're allowed to show was the silhouette of someone driving the car. I remember thinking that, yeah. Oily windscreen type thing, reflections. The argument is what's your user imagery, right?

Starting point is 01:47:08 And the cuddly animal is a brilliant, brilliant cheat to that because user imagery is problematic, okay, in that, I'll give you an example, okay, the average person who buys a car from you, let's say it's a Citroen, I'm probably out of date here, okay let's say a small car from you Volkswagen Golf. Average age of the person buying those from you is in I think the late 50s. That might be median age actually but it's certainly in the late 50s. By the way, do you know the car brand that has the lowest average age profile of any purchaser. And you're never going to guess, well, one of the, I need to qualify that it's not the lowest.

Starting point is 01:47:51 You know, Rolls Royce. Really? Yeah. Why? Footballers, rich young people. Oh, of course. You see? So interestingly, interestingly, Rolls Royce has quite a young profile because if you make it rich young,

Starting point is 01:48:07 you're more likely to buy a blinged up car as a rich young person than you are as a rich old person. Probably aren't you? For obvious reasons, I suspect. Some of them reproductive. But the user imagery is always problematic because some of your users probably don't necessarily like your... So obviously, ads for small cars do not show 59-year-old men driving them or 65-year-old

Starting point is 01:48:31 men. They show 27-year-old women, which is a tiny niche of purchases of those cars new. It's quite a common purchase of those cars secondhand, but new, very, very few. You've got to be pretty rich at 20 something to buy a new car at all. So you have this problem with user energy. Now, the typical BMW driver, what's aspirational to some people might be repellent to others. Okay. So showing people is problematic because you immediately get into questions of class and age

Starting point is 01:49:05 and everything else. Now, sometimes you can play that game brilliantly as with John Smith's beer, where you show an old bloke in the pub with his dog Tonto, which is obviously not intended to be emblematic of the people who bought the beer, but it's kind of emblematic of people who, in a sense, were beer connoisseurs, you know, that kind of thing. But actually animals are a brilliant, brilliant escape from this because most people were like that Bucky's beaver, okay? In a way that a person, even in some cases, a celebrity spokesman, you know, may not be liked by everybody, it may be repellent to everybody, but animals both attract attention for evolutionary reasons.

Starting point is 01:49:47 We look at things that have two eyes, the whole thing in pareidolia. We see faces and things. Mm-hmm. Okay, we see faces in clouds and all that sort of stuff. And that's because we're evolved to be highly attuned to spotting not only other human faces, although that's obviously important, but actually spotting anything only other human faces, although that's obviously important, but actually spotting anything with a face.

Starting point is 01:50:12 You get extraordinary biomimicry, by the way. It's fantastic things where if you have orchids that look like the genitalia of insects, it was like that. Is this Sam Tatum stuff again? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the wonderful book, the, um, evolutionary ideas by- Yeah. I mean, you, you loop me in with him four years ago, something like that.

Starting point is 01:50:30 For the people- Does he mean on? He has, he came on for evolutionary ideas. People that need to, that love this. Imagine an intersection between David Buss and Rory Sutherland and you've got Sam Tatum. Uh, yeah, that was fascinating. But no, it's, uh, it's interesting to think about.

Starting point is 01:50:45 This seems like such a- What you're doing is you're hacking perception. Yeah. It's what you might call, I never remember what it's called. There's a field of sort of philosophy which is called phenomenology, which is how humans actually perceive the world. In other words, the yawning gap between what is, as is measured by engineers and physicists,

Starting point is 01:51:06 and what we feel. Now, the simplest example of which they do in the United States, I think fantastic, okay, is the difference between the temperature and the fields like temperature. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay? Because you can sometimes, I wander around Phoenix, Arizona, and I hate hot, humid weather, but I wander around Phoenix, Arizona, you know, at 100 degrees, I'm pretty happy. And so the fields-like temperature is much more important to my sense of wellbeing and what I wear and where I go than the actual temperature.

Starting point is 01:51:33 The place that's got the most, the highest variance of within a day, intraday variance for that, it's New York. If you go to New York, like March time. They're rude about the London climate. This really pisses me off that New Yorkers are always dissing London. But actually it probably rains more in New York than it does in London. I wouldn't be surprised. But also the city is uninhabitable for about three months of the year. Well look, if you leave the house on a morning in March and you need a big coat, a large

Starting point is 01:52:03 coat with a hoodie underneath and by midday you wish that you put fucking shorts on. I know. It's unacceptable. Rory Sutherland, ladies and gentlemen. It's been an absolute joy. Rory, I love you a bit. Thank you for being here.

Starting point is 01:52:14 What a pleasure. What have you got coming? We haven't had any product placement. We've done a good job for Buc-Ease. Yeah, Rory. Come on, do us a little ad. Do a quick ad to camera for Newtonic. Well, I was trying to start the interesting precedent where guests on podcasts got to

Starting point is 01:52:28 advertise their own stuff because I thought they've done all the traveling. Why is it the host? What do you want to advertise? Why don't I say Bussies Bytes in Westrom, which I think is Kent's finest Jamaican Italian cafe. There we go. So there we go. I'll advertise them.

Starting point is 01:52:44 I always think they're wonderful. Bussies Bites. This actually is extraordinarily drinkable and it may well be, you know, a component of it, I'm sure, is the placebo, but it does seem to be actually efficacious. That's what we wanted to hear. Seems to be efficacious, exactly what I needed. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting

Starting point is 01:53:10 and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free. And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.

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Modern Wisdom - #973 - Rory Sutherland - Waymo, Texas Culture, Airline Lounges, OpenAI & Uber Eats

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